Europe Straightens Its Spine… Just Kidding, Starmer Says “Try Hunching Harder”
Sir Keir Starmer — Britain’s newest Head Prefect of Earnest Managerialism — has graciously offered Europe a bold new strategy for combating immigration and blocking the far-right: end human rights.
It’s the kind of idea only a lawyer-bureaucrat could love: a surgical rewrite of commitments, a procedural shuffle, a delicately footnoted rearrangement of moral obligation. Because when civilization feels like it’s decaying — or, as Trump more poetically puts it, “rotting like a week-old Big Mac under a tanning lamp” — what people really crave is a good, clean, legally compliant circumvention of their own principles. Inspirational!
Starmer seems to imagine himself walking into a burning building — Europe aflame with disinformation, migration crises, geopolitical shocks — armed with a three-ring binder labeled “Adjustments to Supranational Governance Frameworks (Draft)”. Somewhere, a Brussels technocrat got goosebumps.
And yet… wouldn’t it be nice, just once, if Europe stood tall instead of adopting its trademark crouch? That familiar protective hunch, the “please-don’t-hurt-us” posture perfected across decades of waiting to see whether Washington’s next president will scowl, tweet, sanction, praise, or simply forget the continent exists.
Because the truth is, Europe already is carrying the heavy load. It’s underwriting Ukraine’s survival, absorbing the economic shockwaves, stabilizing its borders, and still finding the time to argue passionately about agricultural subsidies. Meanwhile the U.S. has reinstalled Trump, a man whose foreign policy doctrine is essentially: “Europe should pay more, do more, smile more, and maybe I won’t kick over your sandcastle.”
So along comes Starmer, offering Europe a legalistic cheat code: duck your own commitments just a little , and—abracadabra!—no more far-right parties. Problem solved. Democracy restored via clever redrafting.
But perhaps the continent deserves better than clever redrafting. Perhaps the response to encroaching authoritarianism shouldn’t be to mimic its paperwork. Perhaps the stronger move is simply to stop hunching, roll those shoulders back, and say: We’re Europe. We’ve handled worse than this. And we don’t need permission slips from Washington—or London—to defend liberal democracy.
One might ask: why must Europe always be crouched? Bent? Half-folded like a diplomatic origami crane? Why not, for once, stand straight and say: “We are already carrying the geopolitical backpack — the war in Ukraine, the refugees, the energy crisis — perhaps we don’t also need to contort ourselves to appease Washington and outflank Hungary and ward off Marine Le Pen using only a stapler and shared-values rhetoric.”
But alas, that would require the thing European leaders fear most: a spine.
Instead, we get Starmer’s modest proposal: a technical workaround disguised as moral vigilance. A gesture bold enough to impress the Financial Times editorial board, yet soft enough not to upset anyone important — especially Americans with election fever.
It is, in short, the perfect twenty-first century European policy: principled in theory, inflatable in practice, and articulated with the tone of someone apologizing for existing.
Will it stop the far right? No.
Will it make Europe feel like it’s “doing something”? Absolutely.
Will Trump notice? Not unless someone draws it on a map with crayons.
But hey — at least the paperwork will be immaculate
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